Hi, I'm a person living in the North East of England who has schizophrenia. I have been in and out of hospital between 2001-2004. This blog will be notes about my experiences as a patient (aka client) both in hospital and in the community. I can be contacted via email to ian DOT bruntlett AT gmail.com (delete the "DOT", "AT" and spaces from that email address). What is schizopanic? Its the panic that flashes through someone's eyes when you tell them you've got schizophrenia.

Saturday, August 26, 2017

A day in the life of a Womble - August 2017

Sometime back, Jean's computer failed. The Computer Wombling Project had recently been given a tower PC so that was tested, the hard drive wiped and lubuntu Linux installed and passed on to Jean.

Spent a good amount of time last night and today trying to prod Jean's old computer to work - resorted to scavenging parts today.

I have a device, which I call the "Octopus" - actually a "USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE adapter with power adapter" which I used to connect the scavenged hard drive and DVD writer. I gave the hard drive a new partition table and formatted the hard drive (ext4, of course).

The computer doing the formatting etc is a Dell Latitude CPx J650GT laptop. It is a 2003 era device (used sudo dmidecode for that info) and I use it to check devices I am not completely sure of. Waste not, want not and all that. Hostname is verne, user name is jules - so the command prompt reads "jules@verne".

I used GPartED on the scavenged laptop to create the new partition table and partition and as a result the new partition was owned by "root". I tried using sudo chmod and sudo chown and sudo chgrp. Eventually, after a certain amount of time, the laptop grudgingly agreed that a non-root user could write to the drive.